Volume 58, number 1 of The Bell System Technical Journal, published in January 1979 by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, discloses through several articles therein the Advanced Mobile Phone Service, a cellular mobile radio telephone system. At page 23 therein, it is stated that when a system is first installed, cell sites are omnidirectional in the horizontal plane. As initial systems grow into mature systems, however, omnidirectional antennas will be augmented by three 120-degree sector antennas called alpha, beta and gamma: each voice channel in a cell site being transmitted and received over one of the three antennas.
As stated at page 47 of the aforesaid Journal, supervision is the process of detecting customer intiated changes in the switch-hook state of a telephone. In order to avoid false supervision caused by co-channel interference, from the reuse of channels, the aforesaid cellular system uses a combination of a signaling tone (ST) burst and a continuous out-of-band, supervisory audio tone (SAT). Three SAT's are set aside at 5970, 6000, and 6030 Hz; any one is used at a given cell site. A mobile unit receives a SAT from a cell site and returns it to the cell site. It is important for the cell site to compute reliably the SAT returned from the mobile unit within a predetermined period. This invention teaches the rapid and accurate computation of the SAT from a variety of sources concurrently.